Publication details

When Do Bounds and Domain Propagation Lead to the Same Search Space

Christian Schulte, Peter J. Stuckey

Third International Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming, ACM Press, September 2001

This paper explores the question of when two propagation-based constraint systems have the same behaviour, in terms of search
space. We categorise the behaviour of domain and bounds
propagators for primitive constraints, and provide theorems
that allow us to determine propagation behaviours for
conjunctions of constraints. We then show how we can use this
to analyse CLP(FD) programs to determine when we can safely
replace domain propagators by more efficient bounds propagators
without increasing search space.